An average patient may not appreciate the extent to which the medical-services providing industry is a communications-intensive enterprise fraught with the potential for missed and miscommunications. Consider as a small scale example, a solo practitioners office. (A medical services-providing organization may have merely one doctor in it, or merely one other kind of medical services-providing person in it, although typically medical SPO's are comprised of more than one person; e.g., a nurse, a receptionist, etc.) Test results may be streaming into the one physician's office at all hours for different patients and from different laboratories or specialists and coming in by way of telephone calls, facsimile machines, email, regular hardcopy mail and/or other communication channels and modalities (e.g., peer-to-peer computer communications). Some of the test results may be important ones that need urgent responding to while most are probably routine ones that merely report results within expected normal ranges. To the untrained eye, it may be hard to differentiate one type of report from the other. As the various reports are coming in through the various communication channels, the affected doctor may be busy running about his or her office ping ponging between the servicing of one patient in one waiting room to another in another room, and/or to talking with other medical service providers (e.g., nurses, radiologists, other doctors, etc.) in the interim all while perhaps being unaware that an important report may have come in and is in need of urgent responding to. Aside from being highly mobile within his/her own office suite, the doctor may at times be situated in his/her car and may be engaged in driving to the hospital for an emergency consultation when a possibly-critical lab result comes in. If the lab result is not truly critical, it would be inappropriate to distract the doctor from his/her driving activities and/or mental concentration on other issues by ringing the doctor's cell phone or pager at that time. One of the many communications problems which face the medical services industry can therefore be characterized as how to efficiently differentiate emergency reports from normal ones and how to locate and inform the appropriate physician of a situation at an appropriate time without overwhelming the doctor with volumes of routine data and distracting the doctor from more pressing matters.
Another of the communications problems facing the medical services industry (even in a small-scale, solo practice) is that patients may be calling in at all hours with questions about their ongoing medical treatment, with concerns about their medical conditions, or with the intent of scheduling a new appointment, or with the desire to re-schedule a missed appointment. A worse problem is that some patients may not be trying to contact the doctor's office at all because they believe it is entirely the doctor's responsibility to contact them if something is wrong. Some of the commonly believed myths among lay patients is that, “(A) If I do not hear from the doctor's office that means everything is OK. (B) Even though I am feeling much worse, the doctor has already seen me, diagnosed the situation, and I should not be calling in again to disturb the doctor and complain like a big baby.”
Unfortunately the first myth (“If I do not hear from the doctor's office . . . ”) is an illogical conclusion that can be amiss for many a reason. The patient who is not hearing from his/her doctor may not realize that the reason is because, as some examples: (1) the battery on their (the patient's) personal cell-phone has run out of energy, or (2) that their home telephone receiver is off the hook or (3) that their answering machine has run into a problem and is not recording or letting messages get through, or (4) that their home facsimile machine (if they have one) is out of paper. It is possible as yet another reason why the patient has not heard from the doctor's office, that (5) a nurse at the doctor's office may have temporarily misplaced the patient's file when she was supposed to call the patient about an abnormal test result and that is why the patient is not being contacted. It is yet further possible that (6) the test results did not even arrive from the laboratory because there is a communications break down between the lab and the doctor's office (e.g., the lab report was lost) or (7) the wrong test was performed and its results came back normal, or (8) the patient's specimen was lost and a test was not even done.
The illogic of the second, above-cited myth (“Even though I'm feeling worse, . . . I should not disturb the doctor . . . ”) should also be apparent. If the doctor is not aware of the deteriorating patient condition, how can the doctor knowingly respond to it. Perhaps the patient is experiencing a severe allergic reaction to just-prescribed medicine and needs to be taken to a hospital emergency room immediately? It is not beneficial to either the patient's or the doctor's interests to use a communications system which discourages patients from contacting the doctor's office with their concerns and which does not assure that legitimate ones of such concerns are actually brought to the doctor's attention—as opposed to just sitting on a loose piece of paper by the receptionist's desk. So many things can go wrong, that it is a wonder the medical-care delivery system works at all. Luckily, in terms of statistics, when a particular communications failure occurs, the one missed or miscommunication usually does not have serious consequences. However, once every so-many thousands of cases, such a failure leads to unnecessary catastrophe and exposure of the physician and/or other Medical Service Providers (MSP's) to legal malpractice suits.
The above-given description of a communications-based hazards in a solo practitioner's practice is just a small scale example. Imagine how much more complicated the picture gets when one deals with a multi-physician practice group or a hospital. The chances for missed communications and miscommunications grows astronomically. The laws of probability indicate that such unfortunate events will therefore happen more often. It is well understood that it is important to have timely and effective communications between two or more of a given patient and service-related persons who are involved directly or indirectly in the providing of medically-related services to that given patient. Proper communication between a Medical Service Provider (e.g., doctor) and a Patient, and/or between other service-related persons, may be essential to the delivery of quality medical care. However, conventional practices do not account for many of the things that can go wrong.
Conventionally, in the medical field, attempts to gather, record, convey, and deliver important information may include a variety of different kinds of interviews and different channels for moving the gathered information from the point of collection or creation to the person or persons who most likely (or most urgently) need to receive that information. There may be, for example, a telephonic interview between patient and nurse in which the patient has questions or concerns to relay to the nurse-practitioner about progress following an initial office visit. If some significant development is uncovered by the nurse, and the doctor needs to be informed quickly, then hopefully the oral and/or paper-based results will catch up with the doctor in a hallway before the doctor disappears into a next waiting room and begins examination of a next patient. The telephonically-gathered results may alert the physician to certain unusual items in thus-far-gathered information and/or to unusual patterns, and these may assist or guide the physician in his/her provision of timely patient care. However, in the time-pressured rush of a modern medical practice, the telephonically-originated paper work and/or orally-acquired information may get diverted or delayed and not get to the doctor on time. Or, given that doctors are only human, some items may escape the doctor's attention. There is also the possibility that the patient and/or interviewer left out some important information because a particular question was not understood by the patient or nurse. Such missed opportunities, oversights and/or like problems which may be associated with information gathering, distribution and delivery may lead to inefficient and degraded provision of medical care. Conventional methods and equipment used in the medical field for information gathering and/or information distribution often fail to provide remedies for problems such the ones introduced in the above examples.
A closer study of the situation reveals that there are many opportunities for missed communications and miscommunications due to complications on the patient's side of the equation, and due to complications on the Medical Service Provider's (MSP's) side of the equation. Patients can be highly mobile and hard to locate. Each patient may have available to him or her, at respective locations and times of day, a different assortment of communication tools by way of which the patient may be effectively reached or not, including wired telephone, wireless telephone, telephone answering machine, facsimile machine, wireless portable computer, desktop computer, and so forth. The context of the patient when a delivery attempt is made is also a factor. For example, a patient may be temporarily or permanently hearing-impaired, visually-impaired, distracted, disoriented, or otherwise disposed when a communication delivery-attempt is made by way of a delivery channel that is inappropriate for the patient's current context. Multiply the possible locations at which a given patient may be found with time-of-day, with patient context, and with probable communication tool at hand, and you already have a complicated set of possible permutations. Add to that the possibility that some patients do not answer telephone calls directly but rather screen calls with an answering machine and then call back only if they feel like it and you can see how the risk for failed communications can grow. In the case where an automated answering machine is a link in the attempted-communications chain, you have a situation where the doctor's office may not know if the initial call was recorded at all by the answering machine, or was recorded on the correct or a wrongly-dialed answering machine (some machines do not self-identify), or was listened to by the intended recipient (e.g., the patient), or by another person who inadvertently erased the message from the doctor's office and did not pass the message along. You also have an example of a situation where the doctors office should not be distributing confidential information via that communication channel because it is not clear who will be picking up the dispensed message.
Problems on the Medical Service Provider's side of the equation tend to be equally if not more complicated. A given physician may be highly mobile and hard to locate at certain times. Each doctor may have, at respective locations and times of day, a different assortment of communication tools by way of which they may be reached or not. Like, patients, doctors and/or other medical service providers may have individual contexts whereby they may be temporarily or permanently impaired or involved in particular tasks that inhibit them from effectively receiving or comprehending a given communication when it comes in. Also, the numbers and types of entities that a doctor's office needs to communicate with, and their respective availabilities and contexts, often define a vastly larger set of possibilities than do those parts of the medical-care delivery system that the typical patient communicates with. By way of some examples, the doctor's office may be have different pharmacies calling in to request prescription refills, or to ask questions about a specific patient or to convey and gather other information. Hospitals or external specialists may be calling in with results, inquiries, care suggestions, etc. Visiting nurses may be calling in to report on patient needs. Information may be arriving at the Medical Service Provider's central office at different times of day, by way of different communication channels (e.g., phone, fax, etc.), in different formats (which formats can include hardcopy formats as well as different computer communication formats). This chaotically incoming deluge of data is typically not pre-sorted according to urgency. Loose slips of paper with important information on them may get misplaced because the person handling it (e.g., a clerk without medical training) may not appreciate the information's significance (e.g., an abnormal potassium level) and the need for swift action. Without automated assistance, the conventional approach to medical-services related communications is a prescription for eventual disaster.
Examples of communications between Medical Service Providers and/or a Patient that tend to be important include: 1) reporting normal and abnormal test results; 2) arranging further tests, office visits, and medical procedures as may be appropriate, as well as following-up on these arrangements to make sure the arranged actions are actually carried out; 3) following up on the progress of patients with acute illnesses, 4) providing periodic health maintenance and monitoring services (which may include sending vaccination reminders, medical instructions, as well as periodic gathering and evaluation of patient health information); and 5) following up on Patients who have missed scheduled appointments.
For the Patients' welfare it may be valuable to immediately inform certain Medical Service Providers of: (a) significantly abnormal test results, (b) situations where Patients are not doing well after a prescribed course of therapy, (c) situations where Patients' health status is showing signs of deterioration, and (d) situations where Patients did not follow through on essential referrals, tests, or appointments.
There are situations where patients may want to be immediately informed of developments in their treatments or where patients may want to immediately inform their care-givers of a concern or development. For example, some patients may want to immediately know about their own test results when those results become available, and about the interpretation of such results given the context of the patient's own health status (e.g. for example, what the patient's cholesterol level should normally be within the patient's particular context including that of age, sex, and past heart or other illness). After starting a particular treatment, a patient may desire to have a means for easily communicating concerns regarding their progress to the involved Medical Service Providers, so that, if a follow up is appropriate, such a follow up on the concern will occur. Further, a given Patient's course of health care might be improved by early notification being sent to the appropriate Medical Service Provider of detection of significant deviations from the patient's prior state of health.
The volume of communications involved in trying to attain one or more of the above goals may easily exceed the capacity of conventional medical practices and systems. Medical personnel, facilities and systems are often stressed by trying to maintain conventional levels of communication which generally do not include one or more of the beneficial add-ons mentioned above. Patient's health care may suffer due to the inability of conventional medical systems to consistently and effectively perform one or more of the beneficial medical communication activities outlined above. It is commonly-accepted knowledge in the medical services community that poor communications may often play a significant role in many medical malpractice allegations.